Friday, May 8, 2020

First, I’ll come out and say that I liked HBO’s The Plot Against America. The six-part miniseries based on Philip J. Roth’s 2004 alternate history novel of the same name, follows the life of a working-class Jewish family, the Levins, in Newark, New Jersey in the early 1940s as they witness the rise of Charles A. Lindbergh to the Presidency of the United States of America.

The real Charles Lindbergh speaking at an America First Rally

The character of Charles Lindbergh is a very complex one. In our history, he was one of the leaders of the isolationist America First movement which sought to keep America out of the Second World War. It is also true he also travelled to Nazi Germany in 1938 and met with high-ranking officials of the Reich. He also upon numerous occasions had expressed anti-Semitic remarks. Historians have since come to see Lindbergh as a well-intentioned but bigoted Nazi sympathizer. In the alternate history world, Roth and the creators of the miniseries, have not far to go in getting their man.

The Levins in an uncomfortable moment.

Like most Americans the Levins (who are modelled loosely on the author Roth’s own family), both husband Herman (Morgan Spector) and wife Evelyn (Winona Ryder) find themselves curiously attracted to the great aviator Lindberg, because as he says on one of his stump speeches when he flies the Spirit of St. Louis to Newark, “It isn’t a choice between Lindberg and Roosevelt; it’s a choice between Lindberg and war.” It’s a theme that resonates enough to bring Lindberg, played by Ben Cole, into the White House. The changes they see, the petty slights and discrimination is incremental at first and but then it begins to build: it’s almost like the story of the frog in the pot of water that is slowly brought to boil, by the time the Levins realize the trouble they’re in, it’s almost too late.

The President and the Rabbi

The series features many strong performances by a strong cast. But one of the standout performances of the series by John Turturro who plays Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, who sells his soul to get in good with the new administration. He conceives of a plan to resettle Jewish families. Curiously, he is blind to see the monumentality of his betrayal until he finds ultimately himself betrayed. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Herman’s nephew Alvin (Anthony Boyle), who joins the Canadian Army in violation of neutrality laws, only to come home wounded to a country that has changed. Although the story is told from the point of view of the extended Levin family, we still get telling glimpses of the changed world around them, with newsreel footage of Lindbergh shaking hands with Hitler in a secret meeting in Iceland, signing a non-aggression pact, which is a twisted fun-house version of the Roosevelt -Churchill meeting and the signing of the Atlantic Charter.Without giving away too much, the ending is left in doubt, which is a departure from the source novel. It’s not too much to say that the show’s producers intended the series to be a reflection of the current situation in the United States, which has seen a resurgence of isolationism, anti-Semitism and with the rise of the so-called alt-right, fascism. Perhaps recent years have stripped away the thin veneer and have revealed what had been lying there all along, under the surface. In the alternate history of the series, it takes a man like Charles Lindbergh to bring out the worst in people; in our world, all it took was the election of Donald Trump.Alternate history in its best form, raises an interrogative mirror to our world and allows us to not only ask what if, but also, if this goes on. The Plot Against America holds such a mirror to our uncertain times and allows us to ask not only these questions, but more. Highly recommended viewing.What’s next?I apologize with lateness of this blog post. Like many people with onset of COVID-19, I am now working from home. I found have found it difficult to manage and deal with the circumstances around us.Next month, I’ll be back with another post. Until that time, please look after each other and yourselves.In the meantime, you can purchaseElvis Saves JFK!for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and nowThe Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.

Sunday, March 29, 2020

This month I am reviewing a long-time favourite series of mine, The Nomad of the Timestreams trilogy – The Warlord of the Air (1971), The Land Leviathan (1974), and The Steel Tsar (1980). These books were among my first exposure to the alternate history genre.The primary protagonist of all three novels is one Captain Oswald Bastable, a Victorian soldier in the British Indian Army, circa 1902. In the opening novel, he’s sent to put down a rebellion in the north-east of India only be taken prisoner in an ambush only to escape into the Temple of the Future Buddha. There’s an earthquake, and suddenly Bastable is thrust forward into the year 1973. Only it’s not our 1973. Neither the First World War or the Second World War, the Great Depression or the Cold War has happened. Instead the great European colonial powers, along with the the United States and Japan, continue to rule the globe. Upon being rescued by a British airship, his adventures only start. After a shorts stint as an air policeman, he gets involved with a motley band of anarchists and revolutionaries, many of whom we meet in different guises in the throughout of the series. Like some latter-day Flying Dutchman, Oswald Bastable is fated to cross from timeline to timeline finding only war but never peace. We next find Bastable in The Land Leviathan, in another 1902, where society has all but collapsed after a devastating global war. After another series of adventures, Bastable finds himself at the side of the “Black Attila,” an African leader set to conquer the world. For me, this is probably the strongest of three books, although the story of Bastable himself actually the slimmest, if only in page count. In many ways, it reminds me of the later works of H.G. Wells, in particular The War in the Air (1902) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933), in his distrust of technology and the blind faith in that progress that most of us still have.The books are connected by the conceit that author Moorcock is actually relating a true story though his grandfather and then much later, himself. This adds an extra layer to the story and a dash of whimsy. And frankly, a part of me would love to believe the stories were true. Together the trilogy is both a criticism of imperialism, race, and of our blind faith in technology and utopia. All of these concerns are as valid today as they were back when the books were first published. Definitely worth an online hunt.Finally…I’m writing this blog in my second week of working from home, like so many of us are. The COVID-19 coronavirus, which seemed like a blip on the horizon last month for so many of us is now a daily reality. I sadly believe that things will get worse before they get better. But an important thing to remember is that things will get better and the current situation indeed will pass. How the situation will pass is in large part, how we respond as a species in the coming months. I would like to believe that we would emerge as more caring and connected, not only for each other but for the world around us.Until that time, stay safe and look after yourselves and each other. I’ll be back next month. In the meantime, you can purchaseElvis Saves JFK!for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and nowThe Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store. Thanks.

Sunday, February 9, 2020

Theatre of Spies is the second book in S.M. Stirling’s alternate history of the Great War, which continues the adventures of American super-spy Luz O’Malley Arostegui, and her companion, technical wizard Ciara Whelan. It’s late 1916 and Teddy Roosevelt is President and America is now at war (Spoilers ahead). Imperial Germany has launched a deadly gas attack on the Entente Powers, all but destroying France and crippling England. America’s eastern seaboard would’ve fallen to similar fate, if not for the intervention of Arostegui, an agent for America’s spy agency the Black Chamber, and her friend Whelan, who is now an agent in her own right. Now word has leaked out that the Germans have developed another potentially war-winning weapon, one that the Entente must have at all costs, if only to maintain the precarious balance.Astroegui and Whelan manoeuvre through a series of masterfully-plotted adventures ending in a satisfying climax. They travel through a deiselpunk paradise of technology given the full-steam ahead signal both by Roosevelt and the pressures of war. Let it not be said that Stirling does not have a sense of humour. Pop culture references abound from James Bond movies, to Hogan’s Heroes, and Young Frankenstein.Stirling is a masterful storyteller, doing what any mature writer does, showing, not telling. By giving his protagonists and antagonists – and us – an opportunity to walk through such a richly-detailed universe, which is a real treat. Stirling is a past master of the alt-history genre, having first cut his teeth in the Draka series, and then moving forward from strength to strength to strength.Highly recommended. Definitely looking forward to the next instalment.Update:

In a previous post, I had written that scientists have recently speculated that they had found evidence of matter leaking in from a neighbouring universe via “Cold Spots” in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), possibly as a result of a collision between bubble universes sometime in our very distant prehistory. The concept of a bubble universe may fly in the face of the generally accepted theory of a flat universe, but a key piece of data retrieved from the European Space Agency’s Planck space telescope suggests that we be in fact living inside a bubble universe of our own, prompting a paper from Nature Astronomy warning a “cosmological crisis.” Reviewing the most recently published data, the paper suggests that Plank, whose mission was to map CMB, may have also recorded a phenomena known as “gravitational lensing,” were gravitational fields are bent, distorted and warped. According to the data, the CMB is being gravitationally lensed much more than expected. One possible explanation for this seeming curvature in spacetime is that the universe is itself closed. In fact, according to the paper, there is a high level of confidence to this, on the order of 99%.Mind blown yet? So let’s draw a few concluding links to set our heads really spinning. If our universe is in fact a gigantic bubble and Cold Spots in the CMB represent matter leaking in from neighbouring universes, is it possible to travel between universes through such a Cold Spot? Have people or other beings done it, accidentally or on purpose? Are there Type V universe-spanning civilizations out there, such as the one in H. Beam Piper’s Paratime series, that have turned these Cold Spots into portals and have mastered how to transit them? I don’t know about you, but my mind is sufficiently blown now. I’m going to have a drink. If you don’t see me in this space next month, it’s quite possible I’ve fallen through a Cold Spot. What's Next?Next month, hopefully now that the ruckus of the move to a new apartment and the setting of my new job continues, I’ll be reviewing The British Lion, a novel of Britain under Nazi occupation, by Tony Schumacher.

Saturday, January 4, 2020

First things first. I am going to say I loved For All Mankind. That gets my biases out of the way, once and for all. As a work of alternate history, the series, whose first season has finished streaming on Apple TV + is an emphatic, positive retelling of that early heroic age of manned spaceflight.The series opens in June 1969, with people around the world glued to their flickering television screens to watch Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov step onto the lunar soil and plant the hammer-and-sickle flag and proudly claim the moon for the “Marxist-Leninist way of life.” Impossibly, the Soviets have beaten Apollo 11 to the moon by a few short weeks. Instead of sending the Americans reeling in panic, showrunner Ronald D. Moore - producer of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica - has President Richard Nixon upping the ante and the space program’s budget by setting the sights on the establishment of the first lunar base. And so, the “race for the base” is on.

Apollo 11 makes its historical landing – albeit with some complications. From there on things get different, with the goal of all subsequent Apollo flights to find water on the moon to sustain the base. In reaction to a female Soviet female cosmonaut making a lunar landing, Nixon orders a crash program to find and train suitable female U.S. astronauts. The plot, which is tight, moves along briskly with enough moments that provide for suitable gasps and clenched teeth. It’s all very plausible stuff.Moore and crew do an excellent job in blending fictional characters with well-developed story arcs with historical personalities. Some reviewers have complained about this at length and note many historical players appear to have been given short shrift. To my mind, they don’t seem to get it. This is first and foremost, a work of alternate history. Historical figures such as Wernher von Braun, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong are well represented. Actor Chris Bauer, for example, does a standout job portraying Deke Slayton, who in our history was one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts but due to heart problem, only flew much later on the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. As a space enthusiast, I commend Moore and his team for getting so many important details right.

An N-1 booster shortly before
failure, June 27, 1972

An important question that many people who have watched the series are asking is when does the point of divergence from our history occur? In our history, the Soviet N-1 booster which was to carry Leonov to the moon never made it off the pad, past a few disastrously short test flights, the last of which occurred in 1974. Although the design process began in 1961, around the same time as JFK’s announcement to land a man on the moon and return him by the end of the decade, the N-1 project was plagued by poor funding and competing priorities. The project only seemed to gain any real impetus in 1964, by which time it was almost too late. Another problem was the fractured nature of Soviet space program which had multiple design bureaus competing against each other for scant funding and often not in best interests of the program. Finally, there was the health of Sergei Korolev, “Chief Designer” of the Soviet space program and chief backer of the moon program who died under routine surgery in 1966.The only way I could see of Leonov getting to the moon is that the Soviet leadership took JFK seriously and funded Korolev’s N-1 project as far back as the U.S. President’s announcement. They would also have given Korolev total leadership on the project, so to rule out any competing visions. There is also the question of Korolev’s health, but we have a handy answer for that. Moore and the writers of For All Mankind have stated that in their history, Korolev survived the surgery and went on to work the kinks out of the N-1 in time to beat the Americans to the moon.I highly recommend this series. This the new standard-bearer for alternate history on the small screen. This not only how the space race could’ve been, it’s how it should’ve been. As of this writing, For All Mankind has been renewed for a second season. Indeed, the post-credits scene in the season’s final episode ends things on a particularly triumphant note. I eagerly anticipate whatever direction the next season will take. Mars, anyone?

What's Next?

It's been an eventful year-end around the old blog. I have a new job, for which I am exceedingly grateful for. I thank all of my readers for your continued support.Next month I'll be reviewing the second book in S.M. Stirling’s alternate First World War series, Theater of Spies, which continues the adventures of American super-spy Luz O’Malley Arostegui, and her companion, technical wizard Ciara Whelan. After that, I’ll be reviewing The British Lion, a novel of Britain under Nazi occupation, by Tony Schumacher.

About Me

Michael Cnudde is the fevered mind behind Somerset House Press. He is a writer, editor, corporate communications professional, and a former educator. Michael enjoys writing poetry and short speculative fiction. He is currently is working on his next novel. He lives in Toronto, Ontario where he plots global domination in his spare time.
All opinions the author expresses are his own.
Follow Michael Cnudde on Twitter: @mcnudde